Content Tagged ‘Andrew Tonkovich’

Halloween is just days away. Maybe you’ve been planning a costume for months, maybe you’re putting on the finishing touches, but if you’re a costume procrastinator (ahem, like me), I bet that right about now you’re scrambling to pull something together. And if you’re a literature lover, then a book-themed, favorite-character-driven guise is probably your go-to.

But let’s be real—you want something other than your typical literary costume: Alice and the Mad Hatter, Dorothy and the Scarecrow (or the Lion, Tin Man, or Toto), Harry Potter, Red Riding Hood, Frankenstein. So over the past couple of days, I’ve browsed my Ecotone collection, and here are the results—five costume ideas that jumped out at me from the pages of my favorite issues. I hope to see some of these on Halloween—and if we’ve caught you a little too frighteningly close for this year’s All Hallows’ Eve, then go ahead and bookmark one for next year!

1. Why not go as Granna, from Clare Beams’s story in issue 17? Sure, her knuckles are swollen and pearly as knobs, but all you really need in order to pull of this illusion is a nightgown—one that reflects a certain kind of ageless glimmer, like a moth’s wings.

2. If you’re in need of a little comedy on the spookiest night of the year, then perhaps a good choice would be Amy Leach’s Modern Moose. Dress in rich shades of brown and decorate your antlers with one of the following: a pill-box hat or trinket horns, party horns, flirty horns. Or go all out and dress in sleek Armani horns.

3. Maybe you like something a little more on-the-nose. If that’s the case, then do some quick research on Egyptian mummification. Dress as Lee Upton’s “participatory mummy” and let someone unravel you. Don’t worry—if they look confused, just surprise them by saying “Hello! I am saying hello! Because that is what I do when I say hello!”

4. With the primaries just around the corner, and no opportunity for an Andrew Tonkovich–inspired Reelection Day, get a group of fellow citizens together and go as ghostly voters. Any combination will do—a female soldier, four bikers, a lost father and his children, a band of cyclists. Just be ready to show proof of residency, or some other evidence of eligibility, as you and your crew hit the town.

5. Perhaps you’re taking your pet to the local pet costume parade, and you’re feeling a little guilty about stuffing poor Fido in that polyester hot dog for the fourth year in a row. Why not make it feel like a brand New Animal, courtesy of Douglas Watson? With just a few tweaks, your pet could be looking like a winner as a miniature racehorse with a jet-black coat and a docile nature—an idea you can feel good betting on.

Have another freakishly delightful costume idea from the Ecotone archives? Send it our way!

–Ryan Kaune, Ecotone Fiction Editor

This installment of On Location comes from Ecotone contributor Andrew Tonkovich, whose story, “Falling,” appears in the Abnormal Issue and Astoria to Zion: Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone‘s First Decade. More recently, his story, “Reelection Day,” appears in the Migration Issue.

Self-Storage

I’m curator of a thousand pieces of decaying artwork, including a few still-brilliant canvases, intricate miniatures, hand-illustrated broadsides, an unpublished (typed) book or two, posters, journals, sketches, all produced by someone dear and, yes, still near, nearer than ever.

I’d lived decades with a representative sampling of these tattered pen-and-ink drawings, oil and acrylic paintings, watercolors, and writings. Their titles: “The Discovery of California,” “You Don’t Have to Eat God,” and “In the Summer We Went to the Mountains.” All were made by the late Dr. Peter Carr of Laguna Beach, California. He was my Comp Lit professor, an activist, a larger-than-life fellow of small stature if terrific self-esteem who created in whatever medium he found handy. He scribbled, typed, drew, painted (even on cardboard and plywood), was perhaps a bit manic or only urgently, unceasingly productive. Just as well because he died, suddenly, in 1981 at age 56, no plan for any of it, not the life’s work, unpublished memoirs, anticipated triumphant gallery show, or incredible output. Thirty years later they came to me.

Here, the rest of it, in a storage unit a mile from my home, behind a roll-up corrugated door: flying-swimming humans and fishes, peace demonstrators, killer jets, Central American ghosts, talking bear, coyote, raven. Peter drew finely layered mountains, captured the transparent, glowing leaves of our Pacific kelp forest, organized the intricate botany of tide pools and assembled among these lonely, alienated humans he meant to save.

Think Kenneth Patchen meets German Expressionist George Grosz. Caricature meets narrative in visionary doomed landscape reverie. Intersecting colors with enthusiastic, funny speech bubble dialog from creature-persons. Or narration by an all-knowing off-stage guide sounding like Peter.

design by Lookout intern Jane Molinary

The weekend is almost here and we know you have exciting plans. But first take a second to read our author roundup and impress your hot date with all the literary insider news.

Did you know that Astoria to Zion contributor Andrew Tonkovich is the weekly host of Bibliocracy on radio KPFK 90.7 FM, broadcasting out of Santa Monica, CA? Join him on Wednesday nights.

“The Sir James Templeman I know liked nothing better than to instruct the groundskeepers to dig another foxhole and install into it another atheist. We had at the plantation at the time of the ‘accident’ 145 full-time nonbelievers enrolled in the campus’s subterranean residency program: skeptics, freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, some of them scientists and some academics, and some just sad, angry, bitter individuals who took Sir James up on his offer of free room and board, as it were, and a generous stipend upon completion of the program, one of many grants, fellowships, and endowed chair positions sponsored by the International Templeman Prize for Faith in Science.”

Excerpted from “Falling” from Astoria to Zion: Twenty-Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone’s First Decade. Copyright © 2014 by University of North Carolina Wilmington. Used by permission of Lookout Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.